But my tomfoolery didn't last too long, because I eventually made the computer do an illegal operation, which shut it down.
I freaked out, because I thought I had broken the law and someone was going to come arrest me. Oh Windows 95, how you let me down!
Just be grateful you didn't mess with the
telephone. If you take it apart or
smash it into a
million pieces, there's a good chance
they'll send the Phone Cops out to get
you. Those guys play dirty. I heard
they once even blew up a building.
You really don't want to get their
attention.
(The sad thing is, you're probably way too
young to get that reference. Unless you
live in Ohio or something.)
Dvorak keyboards have only won in tests administered by Dvorak himself.. The truth is that he was looking to make money off of his patented configuration.
Nonsense. I pasted the text of your article
into a keyboard compare applet, which is an objective
test. When typing the text
you typed, the Dvorak keyboard scores better
in ALL the important metrics that it covers,
including:
percentage of keystrokes in home row:
qwerty, 34.06%; dvorak, 67.55%
percentage of keystrokes that required
using the same hand as the previous keystroke:
qwerty, 36.26%; dvorak, 23.40%
percentage of keystrokes that required using
the same finger as the previous keystroke:
qwerty, 5.909%; dvorak, 2.317%
Given that moving from the home row slows
you down, and given that alternating hands
and (to a lesser extent)
alternating fingers gives you a
level of parallelism that increases speed
(kind of like superscalar processors
process parts of instructions in parallel
with multiple execution units that each
has its own ALU),
the Dvorak layout seems to be scoring
better.
While we're on the subject of alternating
hands, a friend of mine told me an amusing
anecdote about some programmers he knew
that were having an ongoing typing
competition around the office.
They had written some program
to spit out random text (composed of words
strung together from/usr/dict/words, I think),
record how long it takes the user to type
it, and compute and record the score.
One of the programmers hit upon an idea:
he could improve his score if he hacked
the testing program to spit out only words
that had a high degree of alternation between
the hands. That is, one-handed words
"aftertaste" and "lollipop" would be avoided,
and highly-alternating words like
"enchantment" and "proficiency"
would be favored. As the story goes, this
cheat
gave them the ability to get higher scores
than the competition, even when taking the
test while others watched to verify that
nothing fishy was going on. (All that's
necessary is to make the program key off
some environment variable set in your.profile or whatever.)
Though that anecdote is only from memory,
ask yourself whether "aftertaste" and "lollipop"
are indeed to type on a
QWERTY keyboard than than "enchantment"
and "proficiency" are.
I think you'll agree that maximizing
alternation between hands is an important
characteristic of a good keyboard layout.
Furthermore, based on that applet, it
seems clear that the Dvorak layout
does a better
job than the QWERTY layout does of
maximizing alternation between hands
when typing English prose.
You fight terrorists with the Law.
You treat terrorists as criminals. You hunt masterminds with Interpol. You capture them, and give them a fair trial.
It worked with Libia and the Lockerbie disaster [google.com], which before 9/11 was the worst act of terrorism perpetrated on americans (nearly 200 died).
Note that Libia and colonel Khadafi have renounced terrorism and appear to be genuine so far.
I'm not saying I disagree with your point of
view, but is this really the best example?
Didn't the US send some missiles to knock
out a few building in Khadafi's compound
and in the process wind up killing one or
two of his children? Isn't it possible
that that is part of the reason
Khadafi has changed his tune?
I'm not saying anything either way about
the morality of firing missiles at
his compound, but it does seem like
that piece of information should be
figured into the analysis of whether
police and fair trials alone did
the trick with Khadafi.
Do you really, really, believe that Bin Laden decided to spend several years planning the 9/11 attack, sacrifice several people, kill thousand of innocent people just because he wanted, without a reason? Do you really be that terrorist are the "bad guy" that decides to kill random people
No, I believe that Bin Laden decided to do it
because he's a fundamentalist religious wacko
whose morality is horribly screwed up because
of his beliefs. The irony is that religion
is supposed to bring you closer to God, and
that should make you a more moral person, but
in cases like this, it causes people to totally
lose it and start doing things that are
not even consistent with their religion.
I was just thinking about this earlier.
What is the rational motivation for terrorist
attacks like this? Do the terrorists
really expect Britian to capitulate?
If they do, they have no knowledge of history.
(They are forgetting one of the basic rules
of fighting: know thine enemy.)
The terrorists can't rationally be hoping
to actually motivate Britian to do what
the terrorists want. In reality, all these
attacks will do is motivate Britian to
fight harder against the terrorists.
So what motivation does that leave?
There is nothing constructive or practical
to be gained by carrying out these attacks.
To me, that makes it fairly obvious why
it's happening. It's happening for one
(or both) of the following two reasons:
The terrorists hate Westerners (non-Muslims
a/k/a infidels),
and they enjoy seeing them suffer. Thus,
they are, in effect, carrying out these
attacks for their own enjoyment.
These attacks make the terrorists feel good
about themselves. Their beliefs tell them
that in order to be a good person and feel
good about themselves, they must fight for
their religion. Thus, every infidel that
dies is a sign that they are on the right
track, that they are doing what God wants
them to, and that they should feel good
about themselves, and that God is
pleased with them.
The bottom line is, their ideology tells
them that Westerners are bad. Sure, some
of this has to do with things the West has
done (I'll not deny that Westerners have
screwed over others, just like every nation
does to other nations when given the
opportunity). But (forgive the pun)
the fundamental problem is not what Westerners
have done, but who Westerners are. We aren't
Muslims, and that's enough for fundamentalists
to conclude that we have no value. It's
sort of like "the only good Indian is a dead
Indian", except that it's "the only good
infidel (Westerner) is a dead infidel".
I'm not trying to excuse stupid, greedy,
selfish, self-serving things that the West
has done in various parts of the world.
But, I am saying that even if we were
squeaky clean in our actions, it still
wouldn't be enough.
It is completely opposite way of thought than how American's have previously thought about property. For example how many of you grew up and left doors unlocked to your house or car all the time. I for one never locked my car doors at home nor the front door to my house. It is your private property and you never expect anyone who wasn't welcome to break those boundries
It's true that you wouldn't expect someone
to enter your home. However, if you own a
big empty field, you may not care one way
or the other whether people walk across the
field in order to get somewhere else, if that
field is along the most convenient path for
them to walk. At least, you might not care
as long as they don't leave trash on your
land, etc.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that
as long as you haven't put up No Trespassing
signs or a fence or something, with certain
kinds of property the presumption is that
you don't mind if people walk across it.
If you own land in a rural area, you might
not mind if others walk across it if that
allows them to cross a creek at an easier
point. If you own a parking lot downtown,
you might not mind if people cut through
that parking lot in order to have a shorter
walk from their office building to a restaurant
a block or two over.
How was the guy supposed to know that he didn't intend for the AP to be open to everyone.
This is a good point for two reasons.
The first
is that some access points
at coffee shops, libraries, etc.
are
intentionally open to everyone.
The second is
that it wouldn't be that hard to imagine that
some individual in a residential neighborhood
would intentionally leave their wireless
open: if you have a fast internet connection,
and if the bandwidth isn't metered,
then as long as
it isn't affecting your performance, there
isn't necessarily a compelling reason to
limit access. You can argue security, but
then IMHO the best option is to assume that
all wireless networks are as insecure as the
open internet and set up firewalls and
encryption (like ssh) appropriately. You
can argue that someone might commit a crime
and they'll trace it back to you, but if
you leave your access point open, then perhaps
you might feel that that's enough for reasonable
doubt in a court to give you
protection against getting convicted of
something you didn't do (or even something
you did do!).
The point is not that it's rational to
intentionally
leave
an access point wide open. The point is that
it is rational to believe that someone else
might've intentionally
left an access point wide open.
I have problems with not being able to connect, and problems with audio make it impossible to hear the person on the other end. Other times, it works fine though.
Congratulations. You have discovered
one of the main differences
between packet-switched networks
and circuit-switched networks.
It's not impossible to get good-quality
audio in a packet-switched network,
but TCP/IP doesn't really include the
features that are needed to do it right.
(And that's by design, too -- it makes
many things much simpler. For instance,
it makes routing simpler because you
can change around the topology of the
network while connections are still
established.)
TCP/IP is optimized for bulk data
transfers and getting the
most efficient utilization out of your
equipment, which is a different goal
than reliable, real-time transfers.
That's why voice over IP is cheap
but not always the greatest quality.
It is, fundamentally, a hack. Yes,
there are tricks that make it work better,
but it is still basically a hack at
its core. (Note that I'm talking about
doing VoIP over your broadband connection,
as opposed to solutions that business use,
where they have full control over the
network.)
Don't get me wrong -- I think the
ILECs (traditional phone companies)
are a bunch of lazy, aging, greedy
bastards who'd love to have their
monopolies preserved and will probably
fight dirty to make it happen. But
they do have a pretty good network
in place, and they've had many decades
to refine it, and it works well,
and there are never dropouts during
a conversation due to
network congestion. (Yes, sometimes
it's not possible to place a call
because "all circuits are busy", but
once you place one, if the equipment
isn't damaged, then the quality is
virtually flawless 99.999% of the
time.)
I've thought about alternate methods for
keeping computers cool, and I started to
wonder about just feeding cold air
directly into the intake of the computer
itself, rather than trying to surround
the whole computer with cold air. Then
the computer's hot air output is not
polluting your cold air with hot.
What I had in mind is a sort of a system
that would supply cold air through ducts
(similar to the tubes that are used
for hot air exhaust on a clothes dryer)
at positive pressure. It'd then be a
matter of just hooking these up to your
fan intakes on the computer, and you'd have
very cold air flowing straight through
the system.
One could easily supply the required cold
air through ducts by putting a big cardboard
box (or wooden box, etc., etc.) on the front
of a window unit, then cutting holes and
attaching hoses where required.
I've wondered if anyone has tried something
like this. The disadvantage is that you have
to run new ducts every time you install a
piece of new equipment. The advantage is
that the computers are being fed with
cold air directly after it passes through
the air conditioner's evaporator coil
while it's still cold, instead of reaching
the computers after it has had a chance to
mix with hot air in the room. Kind of like
standing right under the A/C vent when you
go indoors on a really hot summer day.
Oh, you want to play that game, do you?
The Mac mini I'm using to write this message
can do a tad better than the Pentium M system
you describe. I presently have it
hooked to my Kill-a-Watt(tm) meter, and
the whole system is drawing 20W from the
A/C outlet. That's
with disk spinning and CPU mostly idle.
If I peg
the CPU by doing dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null,
the power usage jumps to a whopping 30W.
Maybe I'm just being nitpicky, but I thought
the Sun (proper noun) was a star (common noun),
and that Sol (also proper noun) was another word for
the Sun, and that therefore the Solar System
(also proper noun) specifically refers to the
Sun and the planets surrounding it, not to
any other star systems.
So, saying "Newly Formed Solar System" makes
no sense, because there is only one Solar
System, and we are in it right now, and it
is not newly formed. It makes about as much
sense to call something else a Solar System
as it would if we discovered another continent
and the headline were "New North America Found"
instead of "New Continent Found".
it was a 5-4 decision, which the conclusion being that the supreme court doesn't feel it's their job the decide what falls within the "public good" clause of eminent domain.
I would agree, but for one thing: there is
no "public good" clause. The phrase is
"taken for public use". More
specifically, it's
"nor shall private property be taken for public use".
There are two ways to read this phrase.
In the first (and
broader), "use" would equate to "benefit"
or "purpose", meaning that it'd be OK to
take the private property if
taking it benefited
the public. In the second, "for public
use" would mean that it'd be OK to
take the private property only if the
public will actually use the property.
Roads would qualify because the public
drives on them. Parks would qualify because
the public visits them.
I favor the second view.
If I am being held hostage at knife-point,
and if a police sniper shoots the aggressor
and saves my life, then I have not used
the rifle. The sniper is the one who uses
the rifle, and he does it for my good
or for my benefit.
There is a difference between the words
"use" and "good". There is
a reason we have words with similar
but not quite identical meanings: to be
able to choose a word that expresses
a thought that other similar words do not.
If the first view
were the correct one, then to me it seems
that the framers should've chosen the words
"public good" instead of "public use".
That they didn't is to me an indication that
they didn't mean the public good and that
they must've
meant that the public (or an agent of
the government acting for public purposes)
would actually be required to use
the property that is seized, not that
the public could benefit from private
use of the property in some indirect way.
No, to block things you'd need to do more than tell them not to retain information. You'd need to make sure that even if they did, it was useless. This might point towards requiring people to generate one-time passwords, which would probably be a fair expensive.
I agree that we need this. However, it
isn't necessarily impractical.
My credit card company already does this,
in a sense. When I login to the customer
service web site, I can create a virtual
credit card number that is only good for
a single merchant and which expires at
the end of the month after I generate it.
The problem is, I can only use this
for online purchases or other purchases
(like mail orders where I write down
my credit card info on a form) which
don't require the physical card.
The next step is to make it possible
to do this for every transaction,
and then the step after that is to
remove the one permanent credit card
number on the account
so that I must use a separate
one for every transaction. For that
to happen, I need to be able to carry
around some device (like a smart card
issued by the credit card company)
that allows me to generate numbers
while I'm out at the gas station and
stuff and which allows merchants to know
that the number I've generated is legit.
(Merchants would
get a little uncomfortable if I left
my credit card at home and just brought
the numbers in written down on a piece
of paper.)
Since the credit card company and I
together jointly control the creation
of the virtual credit card
numbers, this means that companies
that process transactions on behalf
of merchants have no need to be involved
in the process and only need access
to the one-use virtual numbers. It
also means that if one of the one-use
numbers is compromised, I have a much
shorter list of people that might have
access to the number, and accountability
is better.
I think the point was the following. If you drop one bomb - what with all the confusion that ensues, none of the politicians can make up their mind - was this just a huge conventional attack, like Dresden? Are the witnesses lying? Was this just a fluke? [... ]
But when you drop a second bomb, the message you are sending is "We can do this every day from now on".
I think there is a lot of validity to that.
On Sept. 11th, 2001, they targeted more than
one site. They got the World Trade Center
towers
and the Pentagon. Because they hit more
than one target, a lot of people including
myself were a bit panicked. My sister was
very worried about my father because he
works in a tall building in Dallas.
Realistically, it's unlikely they were
going to try to hit Dallas (not exactly
filled with world-famous landmarks,
unless you want to fly a plane into
Southfork Ranch and try to hit JR Ewing),
but one attack is an incident, and two or more
is a pattern. You hit a whole
new level of worry when you are trying
to figure
out the next item in the sequence.
The uncertainty is huge -- what if
your city is the next one?
Anyway, part of the point of the nuclear
bombs was to change the attitude of the
Japanese leadership. Destroying someone's
factories and thereby
reducing their ability to
fight doesn't necessarily
provoke them to surrender. Making them
choose to surrender happens in psychological
realm. You're trying to
produce desperation, so that they'll
consider an alternative they have
been telling themselves is not an option.
With one nuclear bomb, they might
look at it as the loss of a city and
some war production capacity --
as a setback, but something that could
potentially be overcome. They might
think the US doesn't have the resolve
to use such a weapon except to use
it once as a demonstration.
When the second hits, the doubt goes out
of control.
They
seriously question whether
they'll ever be able to win the war. But
more than that, they question whether
they'll continue to exist
as a nation or even
continue to exist personally.
Basically, the psychological effect of
two nuclear bombs on the leadership is
much more than twice the effect of one
nuclear bomb. And, obvious as this is,
if one is not enough to convince them
to surrender, then something else is
needed. If two will have a much, much
greater effect than one, then dropping
a second is a reasonable strategy.
I should point out that I'm not a pacifist, simply that many people become one because it's they can find no other way out of the cycle of violence. You can learn a lot by talking to one. Telling yourself that it's okay for you to kill just this one person, or this one set of people, rapidly leads to more and more violence - if it's okay for someone to kill Japanese citizens because of the rape & torture of prisoners, then it's okay for them to kill US citizens because of the killing of innocent Japanese, which makes it okay... etc.
This is exactly why you must never allow
the past by itself to become
justification for targeting some group
of people.
It might be OK in some cases to go to war
and kill some enemy combatants. But it
is never OK to kill because
the person you kill is a member of a group that,
in the past, wronged your group
the person you kill is a different race
you hate them, or you hate what they stand for
the person you killed did something wrong
in the past
No person or group should ever reach the
status where it's a priori OK to
kill them because they are who they are.
If we allow them to reach that status
in our minds, then something is wrong
with us.
Instead, you need to be sure that
the war or the action you take will accomplish
something that justifies it.
And revenge or catharsis don't
count as justification.
It might,
however, really
be the best thing to kill them
if you know they will try to and will have
the opportunity to do something violent in
the future, and if killing them is the
only realistic way to stop them.
Humans have a big problem separating
the motivation of hate from the motivation
of accomplishing something positive.
As the Bruce Cockburn song says, "Everybody
loves to see justice done...on somebody else."
All of this may sound like an argument in
favor of pacifism, i.e. that all war is evil.
In fact, what I'm trying to illustrate here
is that there is such a thing as a wrong
motivation for killing someone (as pacifists
would agree), but there is also such a thing
as a right motivation. It's true that
even when we do have justification, we humans
tend to muddy the waters and do stupid things
like commit war crimes in a justified war.
(Like when the Japanese attacked the US,
and then we put innocent Japanese-Americans
in internment camps.) It happens in virtually
every war. It's a natural human reaction to
hate another group of people, and it can even
serve as motivation. No doubt in some cases
the military cultivates hate for the enemy
in order to keep the troops motivated.
But none of this changes the fact that
sometimes attacking someone really could
be the best thing to do. Only reacting
in defensive ways can sometimes prolong
a conflict. Perhaps the aggressor has
stopped its attack temporarily while it
develops a new weapon or regroups to
attack at a later date (after winter
passes or something). It might be in
such a case that electing to strike while
you have the upper hand will end the
conflict sooner, causing more violence in the
short term, but less in the long term.
Choosing to initiate
violence can be the best thing for
everybody in some cases. Yes, it takes
an extra level of certainty to justify
that type of action (and to avoid overreacting
due to fear of things that might not even
happen).
My problem
with pacifism is that it seems to not
even allow that this type of situation
exists.
I don't think most MSCS graduates are ready
for a senior software engineer position.
To be a competent senior software engineer,
one of the things you need is experience
at completing projects. You need to be
able to plan your time, estimate how long
programming tasks will take, determine
when things are going wrong and what to
do about it (what things to cut, whether
to ditch some of your code and take a
different tack). You may have gotten
some experience at this in school, but
honestly it's hard to get really good
at this stuff without having been
involved in some projects that failed
and some that succeeded. And that kind
of experience is what makes someone
valuable enough to be a senior software
engineer, in most cases. (The other
thing that makes a senior software
engineer is an expert level of
knowledge with some of the specific
industry tools that the project is
using. For instance, if you are doing
J2EE stuff, the senior engineer is
going to know the Java development
environment and all the server
support stuff like the back of his
hand and will be highly productive
in that particular environment.)
So, what does your Master's degree buy
you if it doesn't qualify you to be
a senior engineer? It basically buys you
the ability to start out at the same
level (organizationally) as someone
with a BSCS, but working on some kind
of project that's more technical and
more fun. When a company has a task
that requires an extra level of
technical skill, like working on a
compiler, or doing DSP code, or optimizing
operating systems, they generally prefer
someone who has an MSCS for that kind of
thing.
The good news is, I think an MSCS will
actually get you a better (more interesting
and somewhat high paying) job than a BSCS
will. It's not a ticket that enables you
to jump past the first few steps. It
doesn't substitute for experience. But,
it does open up opportunities to be
involved with certain technical work that
those without an MSCS will have a harder
time getting into.
I grew up very near the Texas Instruments
plant in Dallas, and I heard the following
story from a friend whose dad worked there.
(I had many friends whose dads worked there.
I was virtually the only kid at my school
without one of
those Star Wars LED watches that
came out in the late
1970's, but I digress...)
Anyway, I'm not sure if this story is
true or what...
ANYWAY, the story is this: back in the
day, Texas Instruments had a mail robot.
It wasn't anything fancy, really. It
basically just followed a colored stripe
along the floor, and it stopped periodically
and beeped or something so that people could
come grab their mail or put mail onto it.
Not anything amazingly impressive from an
artificial intelligence point of view, but
still fun to have around and useful
and impresses clients when they tour
the plant.
So, apparently part of the facility
was more than one floor, and at some
point in its life, they taught the robot
to ride the elevator. This may not have
been all that difficult. It already knew
how to avoid collisions by simply stopping
on its stripe and waiting until the obstacle
moved of its own accord, so riding the
elevator is not that much harder: the
doors are just another obstacle to be
waited for, and when they open, it's safe to
move forward, just as in any other case.
Well, that is, it's safe to move forward
when the doors are open with one exception.
You can see where this is going, can't you?
One day the elevator repairman came. Nobody
anticipated what would happen. The
repairman put up a nice
conspicuous sign to
warn people to avoid the open shaft while
repairs were being made.
But the poor robot didn't understand.
It couldn't read. It just followed its
track with a singular dedication to
delivering the mail.
You know, neither rain,
nor sleet, nor snow, nor open elevator
shafts...
Technically he's in violation, but if that argument can hold water in court, then anyone who views copyrighted images online using a cached browser can be charged with unauthorized copying of copyrighted images.
Not necessarily. You can make the argument that
anything that goes into the browser cache
(or indeed, even just
into RAM) is in fact a copy, BUT that whoever
put those copyrighted images on the web in
doing so gave
everyone who visits the
site implicit consent to make a temporary
copy for the purposes of viewing the material.
In other words, it would be authorized (implicitly) copying of copyrighted images,
and would thus be OK.
I think it's absurd that someone could face 20 hours in prison for viewing illegal pictures for 4 hours. But that's just me.
RTFA. He was arrested "for viewing pornographic photos of children online" [emphasis mine].
This is not just somebody's idea of using
the government to impose their morality
on someone else. This is a case of
children being forced into sexual situations
and being photographed. Situations
that they haven't consented to
and aren't even old enough to consent to.
It's child abuse, and children who are
sexually abused usually go on to have
a wide variety of serious emotional
problems for decades afterwards if not
for their entire lives.
And the reason this guy should
go to jail for it, even though he just
viewed the photos and did not create
them, is that accessing the
web site generates demand for the photos,
which encourages people to create more.
In fact, he may have even paid to view
them, which would directly finance the
creation of more of them. With a crime
as bad as sexual child abuse, it's not
reasonable to even allow people to
create an incentive to commit the
crime.
Having said that, for him to be found
guilty of the crime he's accused of,
there probably ought to be some evidence
of intent. If someone were viewing
otherwise-legal pornographic material
and stumbled upon some illegal stuff,
like child pornography, it would be
possible that they didn't mean to
view the files and that they just
weren't computer-savvy enough to know
the photos were still around even
though they didn't want them. Still,
if he had hundreds and hundreds of
photos known to come from a wide variety
of different
sites, then that might be proof of
intent because it'd be just too
much of a coincidence for him to
keep "accidentally" encountering them.
Now Brazil is ruffling the feathers of Bill Gates by wiring its shantytowns using recycled hardware and open-source software. A terrified Gates has tried, unsuccessfully, to schedule a meeting with Brazil's president, who =turned him down=.
An even more fun idea would've been to go ahead
and invite him down, then stand him up.
Leave him waiting at the fucking Rio de Janeiro
International Airport or whatever the hell it's
called. Don't send a car, don't send someone
to meet him, don't send anybody. Just
leave him sitting there, waiting and
waiting. Make him wait until he just
gives up
and has to punt and take the next flight out.
But, of course, make sure that flight isn't
until the next morning (even if he has his
own private jet, etc.) and then do your
best to make sure he can't get a hotel
room either and has to sleep in the airport.
I know, this kind of behavior is probably considered slightly
impolite in international diplomacy circles.
But, I can have my fantasy, can't I?
I'd risk my life to see that, because I know we won't be living on the moon like I thought we would be in the 80s when I was in Jr. High.
OK, like it or not, you've triggered a story:
When my sister was in Jr. High (which
would've been 1979-1982 if I've
done the math right), she had this
woefully out of date science
textbook. It had all kinds of
crazy and laughable things in it, but the
pinnacle was a little sidebar on space
travel, which talked about the challenges
man faced and what we had accomplished.
The last sentence was intended to
inspire students to dream about
ever greater
achievement and exploration. It read,
"Who knows, someday man may even
reach the moon."
Hey, well, good to know that education
is such a priority that the powers
that be are willing to spring for a
new set of books every now and then.
Eh, whatever. It's a tool. You use whatever works best in each situation. The key point with Linux is that it CAN be modified to suit your requirements.
Yeah, yeah. So can this:
#include <stdio.h>
int main ()
{
printf ("Hello, world.\n");
}
That doesn't mean either is the best choice.
Just because something can in principle
be modified to meet my needs doesn't mean
that the advantages of doing so outweigh
the disadvantages (like, not having any
solution at all to my problem for the
months or years it might take to do so).
Oh, this is shameless what I'm about to post,
but here it goes.
If you want confirmation that geeks are at
least somewhat popular with the ladies,
check out the ThinkGeek web page that
sells an "I [heart] My Geek" women's
T-shirt. They have a whole bunch of
shots of actual customers (girls)
wearing
the shirt, and some of them are babes.
I mean, do girls this hot really date geeks?
Apparently so, although I never knew.
Sure, people out there will be building their own OS X boxen, but Apple won't help them do it. And if anyone tries to make a business out of selling boxen that are explicitly marked as "OS X compatible", Apple will bring their lawyers in, force them to remove whatever's making them compatible, and that will be the end of that.
Or...
Apple had authorized clones at one point in the past. They
can do it again if they want. If they
really feel like it, Apple can create
a set of specific hardware standards (specifying
things ranging from a
list of allowed chips all the way to ergonomic
things like placement of buttons) and a suite of
tests that Apple must perform to certify a
licensee's design compliant. Then they
can license
out the Macintosh name (or some language like
"certified OS X compatible") and approve the
vendor as an authorized reseller of
preinstalled OS X.
There are some disadvantages to this idea,
but there are some advantages too: if Apple
made a deal with Dell so that Dell could sell
authorized Macintosh clones, that could
potentially get their software onto a LOT
of desktops, and they'd still get money
for every one of them. They'd be competing
against Microsoft, which is why Dell (in
particular) probably wouldn't do this, but
on the other hand, if Dell's competitors do
it, it could create some pressure for Dell
to offer one as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Just be grateful you didn't mess with the telephone. If you take it apart or smash it into a million pieces, there's a good chance they'll send the Phone Cops out to get you. Those guys play dirty. I heard they once even blew up a building. You really don't want to get their attention.
(The sad thing is, you're probably way too young to get that reference. Unless you live in Ohio or something.)
Nonsense. I pasted the text of your article into a keyboard compare applet, which is an objective test. When typing the text you typed, the Dvorak keyboard scores better in ALL the important metrics that it covers, including:
qwerty, 34.06%; dvorak, 67.55%
qwerty, 36.26%; dvorak, 23.40%
qwerty, 5.909%; dvorak, 2.317%
Given that moving from the home row slows you down, and given that alternating hands and (to a lesser extent) alternating fingers gives you a level of parallelism that increases speed (kind of like superscalar processors process parts of instructions in parallel with multiple execution units that each has its own ALU), the Dvorak layout seems to be scoring better.
While we're on the subject of alternating hands, a friend of mine told me an amusing anecdote about some programmers he knew that were having an ongoing typing competition around the office. They had written some program to spit out random text (composed of words strung together from /usr/dict/words, I think),
record how long it takes the user to type
it, and compute and record the score.
One of the programmers hit upon an idea:
he could improve his score if he hacked
the testing program to spit out only words
that had a high degree of alternation between
the hands. That is, one-handed words
"aftertaste" and "lollipop" would be avoided,
and highly-alternating words like
"enchantment" and "proficiency"
would be favored. As the story goes, this
cheat
gave them the ability to get higher scores
than the competition, even when taking the
test while others watched to verify that
nothing fishy was going on. (All that's
necessary is to make the program key off
some environment variable set in your .profile or whatever.)
Though that anecdote is only from memory, ask yourself whether "aftertaste" and "lollipop" are indeed to type on a QWERTY keyboard than than "enchantment" and "proficiency" are. I think you'll agree that maximizing alternation between hands is an important characteristic of a good keyboard layout. Furthermore, based on that applet, it seems clear that the Dvorak layout does a better job than the QWERTY layout does of maximizing alternation between hands when typing English prose.
I'm not saying I disagree with your point of view, but is this really the best example? Didn't the US send some missiles to knock out a few building in Khadafi's compound and in the process wind up killing one or two of his children? Isn't it possible that that is part of the reason Khadafi has changed his tune?
I'm not saying anything either way about the morality of firing missiles at his compound, but it does seem like that piece of information should be figured into the analysis of whether police and fair trials alone did the trick with Khadafi.
No, I believe that Bin Laden decided to do it because he's a fundamentalist religious wacko whose morality is horribly screwed up because of his beliefs. The irony is that religion is supposed to bring you closer to God, and that should make you a more moral person, but in cases like this, it causes people to totally lose it and start doing things that are not even consistent with their religion.
I was just thinking about this earlier. What is the rational motivation for terrorist attacks like this? Do the terrorists really expect Britian to capitulate? If they do, they have no knowledge of history. (They are forgetting one of the basic rules of fighting: know thine enemy.)
The terrorists can't rationally be hoping to actually motivate Britian to do what the terrorists want. In reality, all these attacks will do is motivate Britian to fight harder against the terrorists.
So what motivation does that leave? There is nothing constructive or practical to be gained by carrying out these attacks. To me, that makes it fairly obvious why it's happening. It's happening for one (or both) of the following two reasons:
The bottom line is, their ideology tells them that Westerners are bad. Sure, some of this has to do with things the West has done (I'll not deny that Westerners have screwed over others, just like every nation does to other nations when given the opportunity). But (forgive the pun) the fundamental problem is not what Westerners have done, but who Westerners are. We aren't Muslims, and that's enough for fundamentalists to conclude that we have no value. It's sort of like "the only good Indian is a dead Indian", except that it's "the only good infidel (Westerner) is a dead infidel".
I'm not trying to excuse stupid, greedy, selfish, self-serving things that the West has done in various parts of the world. But, I am saying that even if we were squeaky clean in our actions, it still wouldn't be enough.
It's true that you wouldn't expect someone to enter your home. However, if you own a big empty field, you may not care one way or the other whether people walk across the field in order to get somewhere else, if that field is along the most convenient path for them to walk. At least, you might not care as long as they don't leave trash on your land, etc.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that as long as you haven't put up No Trespassing signs or a fence or something, with certain kinds of property the presumption is that you don't mind if people walk across it. If you own land in a rural area, you might not mind if others walk across it if that allows them to cross a creek at an easier point. If you own a parking lot downtown, you might not mind if people cut through that parking lot in order to have a shorter walk from their office building to a restaurant a block or two over.
This is a good point for two reasons.
The first is that some access points at coffee shops, libraries, etc. are intentionally open to everyone.
The second is that it wouldn't be that hard to imagine that some individual in a residential neighborhood would intentionally leave their wireless open: if you have a fast internet connection, and if the bandwidth isn't metered, then as long as it isn't affecting your performance, there isn't necessarily a compelling reason to limit access. You can argue security, but then IMHO the best option is to assume that all wireless networks are as insecure as the open internet and set up firewalls and encryption (like ssh) appropriately. You can argue that someone might commit a crime and they'll trace it back to you, but if you leave your access point open, then perhaps you might feel that that's enough for reasonable doubt in a court to give you protection against getting convicted of something you didn't do (or even something you did do!).
The point is not that it's rational to intentionally leave an access point wide open. The point is that it is rational to believe that someone else might've intentionally left an access point wide open.
Congratulations. You have discovered one of the main differences between packet-switched networks and circuit-switched networks.
It's not impossible to get good-quality audio in a packet-switched network, but TCP/IP doesn't really include the features that are needed to do it right. (And that's by design, too -- it makes many things much simpler. For instance, it makes routing simpler because you can change around the topology of the network while connections are still established.)
TCP/IP is optimized for bulk data transfers and getting the most efficient utilization out of your equipment, which is a different goal than reliable, real-time transfers. That's why voice over IP is cheap but not always the greatest quality. It is, fundamentally, a hack. Yes, there are tricks that make it work better, but it is still basically a hack at its core. (Note that I'm talking about doing VoIP over your broadband connection, as opposed to solutions that business use, where they have full control over the network.)
Don't get me wrong -- I think the ILECs (traditional phone companies) are a bunch of lazy, aging, greedy bastards who'd love to have their monopolies preserved and will probably fight dirty to make it happen. But they do have a pretty good network in place, and they've had many decades to refine it, and it works well, and there are never dropouts during a conversation due to network congestion. (Yes, sometimes it's not possible to place a call because "all circuits are busy", but once you place one, if the equipment isn't damaged, then the quality is virtually flawless 99.999% of the time.)
I've thought about alternate methods for keeping computers cool, and I started to wonder about just feeding cold air directly into the intake of the computer itself, rather than trying to surround the whole computer with cold air. Then the computer's hot air output is not polluting your cold air with hot.
What I had in mind is a sort of a system that would supply cold air through ducts (similar to the tubes that are used for hot air exhaust on a clothes dryer) at positive pressure. It'd then be a matter of just hooking these up to your fan intakes on the computer, and you'd have very cold air flowing straight through the system.
One could easily supply the required cold air through ducts by putting a big cardboard box (or wooden box, etc., etc.) on the front of a window unit, then cutting holes and attaching hoses where required.
I've wondered if anyone has tried something like this. The disadvantage is that you have to run new ducts every time you install a piece of new equipment. The advantage is that the computers are being fed with cold air directly after it passes through the air conditioner's evaporator coil while it's still cold, instead of reaching the computers after it has had a chance to mix with hot air in the room. Kind of like standing right under the A/C vent when you go indoors on a really hot summer day.
Oh, you want to play that game, do you? The Mac mini I'm using to write this message can do a tad better than the Pentium M system you describe. I presently have it hooked to my Kill-a-Watt(tm) meter, and the whole system is drawing 20W from the A/C outlet. That's with disk spinning and CPU mostly idle. If I peg the CPU by doing
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null, the power usage jumps to a whopping 30W.
Maybe I'm just being nitpicky, but I thought the Sun (proper noun) was a star (common noun), and that Sol (also proper noun) was another word for the Sun, and that therefore the Solar System (also proper noun) specifically refers to the Sun and the planets surrounding it, not to any other star systems.
So, saying "Newly Formed Solar System" makes no sense, because there is only one Solar System, and we are in it right now, and it is not newly formed. It makes about as much sense to call something else a Solar System as it would if we discovered another continent and the headline were "New North America Found" instead of "New Continent Found".
I would agree, but for one thing: there is no "public good" clause. The phrase is "taken for public use". More specifically, it's "nor shall private property be taken for public use".
There are two ways to read this phrase. In the first (and broader), "use" would equate to "benefit" or "purpose", meaning that it'd be OK to take the private property if taking it benefited the public. In the second, "for public use" would mean that it'd be OK to take the private property only if the public will actually use the property. Roads would qualify because the public drives on them. Parks would qualify because the public visits them.
I favor the second view. If I am being held hostage at knife-point, and if a police sniper shoots the aggressor and saves my life, then I have not used the rifle. The sniper is the one who uses the rifle, and he does it for my good or for my benefit. There is a difference between the words "use" and "good". There is a reason we have words with similar but not quite identical meanings: to be able to choose a word that expresses a thought that other similar words do not.
If the first view were the correct one, then to me it seems that the framers should've chosen the words "public good" instead of "public use". That they didn't is to me an indication that they didn't mean the public good and that they must've meant that the public (or an agent of the government acting for public purposes) would actually be required to use the property that is seized, not that the public could benefit from private use of the property in some indirect way.
I agree that we need this. However, it isn't necessarily impractical. My credit card company already does this, in a sense. When I login to the customer service web site, I can create a virtual credit card number that is only good for a single merchant and which expires at the end of the month after I generate it.
The problem is, I can only use this for online purchases or other purchases (like mail orders where I write down my credit card info on a form) which don't require the physical card. The next step is to make it possible to do this for every transaction, and then the step after that is to remove the one permanent credit card number on the account so that I must use a separate one for every transaction. For that to happen, I need to be able to carry around some device (like a smart card issued by the credit card company) that allows me to generate numbers while I'm out at the gas station and stuff and which allows merchants to know that the number I've generated is legit. (Merchants would get a little uncomfortable if I left my credit card at home and just brought the numbers in written down on a piece of paper.)
Since the credit card company and I together jointly control the creation of the virtual credit card numbers, this means that companies that process transactions on behalf of merchants have no need to be involved in the process and only need access to the one-use virtual numbers. It also means that if one of the one-use numbers is compromised, I have a much shorter list of people that might have access to the number, and accountability is better.
I think there is a lot of validity to that. On Sept. 11th, 2001, they targeted more than one site. They got the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon. Because they hit more than one target, a lot of people including myself were a bit panicked. My sister was very worried about my father because he works in a tall building in Dallas. Realistically, it's unlikely they were going to try to hit Dallas (not exactly filled with world-famous landmarks, unless you want to fly a plane into Southfork Ranch and try to hit JR Ewing), but one attack is an incident, and two or more is a pattern. You hit a whole new level of worry when you are trying to figure out the next item in the sequence. The uncertainty is huge -- what if your city is the next one?
Anyway, part of the point of the nuclear bombs was to change the attitude of the Japanese leadership. Destroying someone's factories and thereby reducing their ability to fight doesn't necessarily provoke them to surrender. Making them choose to surrender happens in psychological realm. You're trying to produce desperation, so that they'll consider an alternative they have been telling themselves is not an option. With one nuclear bomb, they might look at it as the loss of a city and some war production capacity -- as a setback, but something that could potentially be overcome. They might think the US doesn't have the resolve to use such a weapon except to use it once as a demonstration. When the second hits, the doubt goes out of control. They seriously question whether they'll ever be able to win the war. But more than that, they question whether they'll continue to exist as a nation or even continue to exist personally.
Basically, the psychological effect of two nuclear bombs on the leadership is much more than twice the effect of one nuclear bomb. And, obvious as this is, if one is not enough to convince them to surrender, then something else is needed. If two will have a much, much greater effect than one, then dropping a second is a reasonable strategy.
This is exactly why you must never allow the past by itself to become justification for targeting some group of people.
It might be OK in some cases to go to war and kill some enemy combatants. But it is never OK to kill because
No person or group should ever reach the status where it's a priori OK to kill them because they are who they are. If we allow them to reach that status in our minds, then something is wrong with us.
Instead, you need to be sure that the war or the action you take will accomplish something that justifies it. And revenge or catharsis don't count as justification. It might, however, really be the best thing to kill them if you know they will try to and will have the opportunity to do something violent in the future, and if killing them is the only realistic way to stop them.
Humans have a big problem separating the motivation of hate from the motivation of accomplishing something positive. As the Bruce Cockburn song says, "Everybody loves to see justice done ...on somebody else."
All of this may sound like an argument in favor of pacifism, i.e. that all war is evil. In fact, what I'm trying to illustrate here is that there is such a thing as a wrong motivation for killing someone (as pacifists would agree), but there is also such a thing as a right motivation. It's true that even when we do have justification, we humans tend to muddy the waters and do stupid things like commit war crimes in a justified war. (Like when the Japanese attacked the US, and then we put innocent Japanese-Americans in internment camps.) It happens in virtually every war. It's a natural human reaction to hate another group of people, and it can even serve as motivation. No doubt in some cases the military cultivates hate for the enemy in order to keep the troops motivated.
But none of this changes the fact that sometimes attacking someone really could be the best thing to do. Only reacting in defensive ways can sometimes prolong a conflict. Perhaps the aggressor has stopped its attack temporarily while it develops a new weapon or regroups to attack at a later date (after winter passes or something). It might be in such a case that electing to strike while you have the upper hand will end the conflict sooner, causing more violence in the short term, but less in the long term. Choosing to initiate violence can be the best thing for everybody in some cases. Yes, it takes an extra level of certainty to justify that type of action (and to avoid overreacting due to fear of things that might not even happen). My problem with pacifism is that it seems to not even allow that this type of situation exists.
Not anymore. There is a company that has figured out how to do it with computers, and George Lucas has said he wants to use their technology to re-do all 6 movies.
I don't think most MSCS graduates are ready for a senior software engineer position. To be a competent senior software engineer, one of the things you need is experience at completing projects. You need to be able to plan your time, estimate how long programming tasks will take, determine when things are going wrong and what to do about it (what things to cut, whether to ditch some of your code and take a different tack). You may have gotten some experience at this in school, but honestly it's hard to get really good at this stuff without having been involved in some projects that failed and some that succeeded. And that kind of experience is what makes someone valuable enough to be a senior software engineer, in most cases. (The other thing that makes a senior software engineer is an expert level of knowledge with some of the specific industry tools that the project is using. For instance, if you are doing J2EE stuff, the senior engineer is going to know the Java development environment and all the server support stuff like the back of his hand and will be highly productive in that particular environment.)
So, what does your Master's degree buy you if it doesn't qualify you to be a senior engineer? It basically buys you the ability to start out at the same level (organizationally) as someone with a BSCS, but working on some kind of project that's more technical and more fun. When a company has a task that requires an extra level of technical skill, like working on a compiler, or doing DSP code, or optimizing operating systems, they generally prefer someone who has an MSCS for that kind of thing.
The good news is, I think an MSCS will actually get you a better (more interesting and somewhat high paying) job than a BSCS will. It's not a ticket that enables you to jump past the first few steps. It doesn't substitute for experience. But, it does open up opportunities to be involved with certain technical work that those without an MSCS will have a harder time getting into.
I grew up very near the Texas Instruments plant in Dallas, and I heard the following story from a friend whose dad worked there. (I had many friends whose dads worked there. I was virtually the only kid at my school without one of those Star Wars LED watches that came out in the late 1970's, but I digress...) Anyway, I'm not sure if this story is true or what...
ANYWAY, the story is this: back in the day, Texas Instruments had a mail robot. It wasn't anything fancy, really. It basically just followed a colored stripe along the floor, and it stopped periodically and beeped or something so that people could come grab their mail or put mail onto it. Not anything amazingly impressive from an artificial intelligence point of view, but still fun to have around and useful and impresses clients when they tour the plant.
So, apparently part of the facility was more than one floor, and at some point in its life, they taught the robot to ride the elevator. This may not have been all that difficult. It already knew how to avoid collisions by simply stopping on its stripe and waiting until the obstacle moved of its own accord, so riding the elevator is not that much harder: the doors are just another obstacle to be waited for, and when they open, it's safe to move forward, just as in any other case.
Well, that is, it's safe to move forward when the doors are open with one exception. You can see where this is going, can't you? One day the elevator repairman came. Nobody anticipated what would happen. The repairman put up a nice conspicuous sign to warn people to avoid the open shaft while repairs were being made. But the poor robot didn't understand. It couldn't read. It just followed its track with a singular dedication to delivering the mail. You know, neither rain, nor sleet, nor snow, nor open elevator shafts...
Can any Slashdot people confirm this story?
Not necessarily. You can make the argument that anything that goes into the browser cache (or indeed, even just into RAM) is in fact a copy, BUT that whoever put those copyrighted images on the web in doing so gave everyone who visits the site implicit consent to make a temporary copy for the purposes of viewing the material. In other words, it would be authorized (implicitly) copying of copyrighted images, and would thus be OK.
RTFA. He was arrested "for viewing pornographic photos of children online" [emphasis mine].
This is not just somebody's idea of using the government to impose their morality on someone else. This is a case of children being forced into sexual situations and being photographed. Situations that they haven't consented to and aren't even old enough to consent to. It's child abuse, and children who are sexually abused usually go on to have a wide variety of serious emotional problems for decades afterwards if not for their entire lives.
And the reason this guy should go to jail for it, even though he just viewed the photos and did not create them, is that accessing the web site generates demand for the photos, which encourages people to create more. In fact, he may have even paid to view them, which would directly finance the creation of more of them. With a crime as bad as sexual child abuse, it's not reasonable to even allow people to create an incentive to commit the crime.
Having said that, for him to be found guilty of the crime he's accused of, there probably ought to be some evidence of intent. If someone were viewing otherwise-legal pornographic material and stumbled upon some illegal stuff, like child pornography, it would be possible that they didn't mean to view the files and that they just weren't computer-savvy enough to know the photos were still around even though they didn't want them. Still, if he had hundreds and hundreds of photos known to come from a wide variety of different sites, then that might be proof of intent because it'd be just too much of a coincidence for him to keep "accidentally" encountering them.
An even more fun idea would've been to go ahead and invite him down, then stand him up. Leave him waiting at the fucking Rio de Janeiro International Airport or whatever the hell it's called. Don't send a car, don't send someone to meet him, don't send anybody. Just leave him sitting there, waiting and waiting. Make him wait until he just gives up and has to punt and take the next flight out. But, of course, make sure that flight isn't until the next morning (even if he has his own private jet, etc.) and then do your best to make sure he can't get a hotel room either and has to sleep in the airport.
I know, this kind of behavior is probably considered slightly impolite in international diplomacy circles. But, I can have my fantasy, can't I?
OK, like it or not, you've triggered a story:
When my sister was in Jr. High (which would've been 1979-1982 if I've done the math right), she had this woefully out of date science textbook. It had all kinds of crazy and laughable things in it, but the pinnacle was a little sidebar on space travel, which talked about the challenges man faced and what we had accomplished. The last sentence was intended to inspire students to dream about ever greater achievement and exploration. It read, "Who knows, someday man may even reach the moon."
Hey, well, good to know that education is such a priority that the powers that be are willing to spring for a new set of books every now and then.
Yeah, yeah. So can this:
That doesn't mean either is the best choice. Just because something can in principle be modified to meet my needs doesn't mean that the advantages of doing so outweigh the disadvantages (like, not having any solution at all to my problem for the months or years it might take to do so).
I agree... It is nice to have a fresh perspective on Episode IV.
Oh, this is shameless what I'm about to post, but here it goes.
If you want confirmation that geeks are at least somewhat popular with the ladies, check out the ThinkGeek web page that sells an "I [heart] My Geek" women's T-shirt. They have a whole bunch of shots of actual customers (girls) wearing the shirt, and some of them are babes. I mean, do girls this hot really date geeks? Apparently so, although I never knew.
Or...
Apple had authorized clones at one point in the past. They can do it again if they want. If they really feel like it, Apple can create a set of specific hardware standards (specifying things ranging from a list of allowed chips all the way to ergonomic things like placement of buttons) and a suite of tests that Apple must perform to certify a licensee's design compliant. Then they can license out the Macintosh name (or some language like "certified OS X compatible") and approve the vendor as an authorized reseller of preinstalled OS X.
There are some disadvantages to this idea, but there are some advantages too: if Apple made a deal with Dell so that Dell could sell authorized Macintosh clones, that could potentially get their software onto a LOT of desktops, and they'd still get money for every one of them. They'd be competing against Microsoft, which is why Dell (in particular) probably wouldn't do this, but on the other hand, if Dell's competitors do it, it could create some pressure for Dell to offer one as well.